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Microsoft goes its own way with Web audio/video spec, despite W3C rebuff

Redmond first announced CU-RTC-Web in August. Along with the specification itself, the company produced a rationale; a list of reasons why it felt that WebRTC was a bad fit for the problem at hand, and why CU-RTC-Web was a superior solution. Perhaps the most specific complaint was that WebRTC was quite deeply linked to a specification called SDP, an open industry standard used extensively for VoIP and video conferencing systems in conjunction with SIP, with Microsoft arguing that this is over-complicated and hinders interoperability with non-SDP systems. SDP is used to negotiate the parameters of the connection; things like the bandwidth, the IP addresses and port numbers to use, and so on.

It just happens that Microsoft has non-SDP products of its own—Skype (which remains stubbornly proprietary and undocumented) and Lync (which can bridge with SIP systems, and hence understands SDP, but offers alternative APIs too).